SoroushVahidi/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Gray and color image contrast enhancement by the curvelet transform
(2003)

We present in this paper a new method for contrast enhancement based on the curvelet transform. The curvelet transform represents edges better than wavelets, and is therefore well-suited for multiscale edge enhancement. We compare this approach with enhancement based on the wavelet transform, and the Multiscale Retinex. In a range of examples, we use edge detection and segmentation, among other processing applications, to provide for quantitative comparative evaluation. Our findings are that curvelet based enhancement out-performs other enhancement methods on noisy images, but on noiseless or near noiseless images curvelet based enhancement is not remarkably better than wavelet based enhancement.
A novel algorithm for color constancy
(1990)

Color constancy is the skill by which it is possible to tell the color of an object even under a colored light. I interpret the color of an object as its color under a fixed canonical light, rather than as a surface reflectance function. This leads to an analysis that shows two distinct sets of circumstances under which color constancy is possible. In this framework, color constancy requires estimating the illuminant under which the image was taken. The estimate is then used to choose one of a set of linear maps, which is applied to the image to yield a color descriptor at each point. This set of maps is computed in advance. The illuminant can be estimated using image measurements alone, because, given a number of weak assumptions detailed in the text, the color of the illuminant is constrained by the colors observed in the image. This constraint arises from the fact that surfaces can reflect no more light than is cast on them. For example, if one observes a patch that excites the red receptor strongly, the illuminant cannot have been deep blue. Two algorithms are possible using this constraint, corresponding to different assumptions about the world. The first algorithm, Crule will work for any surface reflectance. Crule corresponds to a form of coefficient rule, but obtains the coefficients by using constraints on illuminant color. The set of illuminants for which Crule will be successful depends strongly on the choice of photoreceptors: for narrowband photoreceptors, Crule will work in an unrestricted world. The second algorithm, Mwext, requires that both surface reflectances and illuminants be chosen from finite dimensional spaces; but under these restrictive conditions it can recover a large number of parameters in the illuminant, and is not an attractive model of human color constancy. Crule has been tested on real images of Mondriaans, and works well. I show results for Crule and for the Retinex algorithm of Land (Land 1971; Land 1983; Land 1985) operating on a number of real images. The experimental work shows that for good constancy, a color constancy system will need to adjust the gain of the receptors it employs in a fashion analagous to adaptation in humans.
Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization image processing to improve the detection of simulated spiculations in dense mammograms
(1998)

The purpose of this project was to determine whether Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) improves detection of simulated spiculations in dense mammograms. Lines simulating the appearance of spiculations, a common marker of malignancy when visualized with masses, were embedded in dense mammograms digitized at 50 micron pixels, 12 bits deep. Film images with no CLAHE applied were compared to film images with nine different combinations of clip levels and region sizes applied. A simulated spiculation was embedded in a background of dense breast tissue, with the orientation of the spiculation varied. The key variables involved in each trial included the orientation of the spiculation, contrast level of the spiculation and the CLAHE settings applied to the image. Combining the 10 CLAHE conditions, 4 contrast levels and 4 orientations gave 160 combinations. The trials were constructed by pairing 160 combinations of key variables with 40 backgrounds. Twenty student observers were asked to detect the orientation of the spiculation in the image. There was a statistically significant improvement in detection performance for spiculations with CLAHE over unenhanced images when the region size was set at 32 with a clip level of 2, and when the region size was set at 32 with a clip level of 4. The selected CLAHE settings should be tested in the clinic with digital mammograms to determine whether detection of spiculations associated with masses detected at mammography can be improved.
Photographic tone reproduction for digital images
(2002)

A classic photographic task is the mapping of the potentially high dynamic range of real world luminances to the low dynamic range of the photographic print. This tone reproduction problem is also faced by computer graphics practitioners who must map digital images to a low dynamic range print or screen. The work presented in this paper leverages the time-tested techniques of photographic practice to develop a new tone reproduction operator. In particular, we use and extend the techniques developed by Ansel Adams to deal with digital images. The resulting algorithm is simple and is shown to produce good results for the wide variety of images that we have tested. Photographic Tone Reproduction for Digital Images Erik Reinhard University of Utah Michael Stark University of Utah Peter Shirley University of Utah Jim Ferwerda Cornell University
Mixture of experts for classification of gender, ethnic origin, and pose of human faces
(2000)

In this paper we describe the application of mixtures of experts on gender and ethnic classification of human faces, and pose classification, and show their feasibility on the FERET database of facial images. The FERET database allows us to demonstrate performance on hundreds or thousands of images. The mixture of experts is implemented using the "divide and conquer" modularity principle with respect to the granularity and/or the locality of information. The mixture of experts consists of ensembles of radial basis functions (RBFs). Inductive decision trees (DTs) and support vector machines (SVMs) implement the "gating network" components for deciding which of the experts should be used to determine the classification output and to restrict the support of the input space. Both the ensemble of RBF's (ERBF) and SVM use the RBF kernel ("expert") for gating the inputs. Our experimental results yield an average accuracy rate of 96% on gender classification and 92% on ethnic classification using the ERBF/DT approach from frontal face images, while the SVM yield 100% on pose classification.
Building Optimal Question Answering System Automatically using Configuration Space Exploration (CSE) for QA4MRE 2013 Tasks
(2013)

Different software systems for automatic question answering have been developed in recent years. Some systems perform well on specific domains, but may not be appropriate for other domains. As the complexity and scaling of such information systems become ever greater, it is much more challenging to effectively and efficiently determine which toolkits, algorithms, knowledge bases or other resources should be integrated into a system so that one can achieve a desired or optimal level of performance on a given task. In this working notepaper, we present a generic framework that can be used for any machinereading task and automatically find the best configuration of algorithmic components as well as values of their corresponding parameters. Although we have designed the framework for all QA4MRE-2013 tasks (i.e. Main task, Biomedical about Alzheimer’s and Entrance Exam), our analysis will mostly focus on Biomedical about Alzheimer’s task. We introduce the Configuration Space Exploration (CSE) framework, an extension to the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) which provides a general distributed solution for building and exploring possible configurations for any intelligent information system. For the Biomedial about Alzheimer’s task, CSE was used to generate more than 1000 different configurations from existing components; we selected the 3 best runs for submission. We achieved an average c@1 of 0.27; our highest score was 0.60 for reading-test-1, and our lowest was 0.0 for reading-test3. We further enhanced the system by introducing point-wise mutual information (PMI) scoring for answer ranking, which produced an average c@1 of 0.4025, with a highest score of 0.77 for reading test-1 and a lowest score of 0.2 for reading test-2.
Automated user modeling for personalized digital libraries
(2006)

Digital libraries (DL) have become one of the most typical ways of accessing any kind of digitalized information. Due to this key role, users welcome any improvements on the services they receive from digital libraries. One trend used to improve digital services is through personalization. Up to now, the most common approach for personalization in digital libraries has been user-driven. Nevertheless, the design of efficient personalized services has to be done, at least in part, in an automatic way. In this context, machine learning techniques automate the process of constructing user models. This paper proposes a new approach to construct digital libraries that satisfy user’s necessity for information: Adaptive Digital Libraries, libraries that automatically learn user preferences and goals and personalize their interaction using this
First-Order Mixed Integer Linear Programming
(2009)

Mixed integer linear programming (MILP) is a powerful representation often used to formulate decision-making problems under uncertainty. However, it lacks a natural mechanism to reason about objects, classes of objects, and relations. First-order logic (FOL), on the other hand, excels at reasoning about classes of objects, but lacks a rich representation of uncertainty. While representing propositional logic in MILP has been extensively explored, no theory exists yet for fully combining FOL with MILP. We propose a new representation, called first-order programming or FOP, which subsumes both FOL and MILP. We establish formal methods for reasoning about first order programs, including a sound and complete lifted inference procedure for integer first order programs. Since FOP can offer exponential savings in representation and proof size compared to FOL, and since representations and proofs are never significantly longer in FOP than in FOL, we anticipate that inference in FOP will be more tractable than inference in FOL for corresponding problems.
Speed and power scaling of SRAM's
(2000)

Simple models for the delay, power, and area of a static random access memory (SRAM) are used to determine the optimal organizations for an SRAM and study the scaling of their speed and power with size and technology. The delay is found to increase by about one gate delay for every doubling of the RAM size up to 1 Mb, beyond which the interconnect delay becomes an increasingly significant fraction of the total delay. With technology scaling, the nonscaling of threshold mismatches in the sense amplifiers is found to significantly impact the total delay in generations of 0.1 /spl mu/m and below.
Prevention of Relay Attack Using NFC
(2014)

Near Field Communication (NFC) is one of the emerging and promising technological developments for mobile phones and other contactless devices. NFC technologies allow two active devices embedded with chip transmit small pieces of data between each other via short range wireless connection and at low speed depending on the configurations. It offers low friction process because of the close range that the two NFC enabled devices can setup a connection. The combination of NFC with smart devices has led to development and range of NFC that includes data exchange, service discovery, connection, e-payment, and ticketing. With the help of a NFC enabled phone and card reader device, contactless card transaction can be performed. Security problems related to relay attack were analyzed and identified a proper solution to prevent the attack. In the proposed system, a Frame wait integer is used to check and verify data manipulation, by attaching the transacted data with a signed integer.
Completion and Reconstruction with Primitive Shapes
(2009)

We consider the problem of reconstruction from incomplete point-clouds. To find a closed mesh the reconstruction is guided by a set of primitive shapes which has been detected on the input point-cloud (e.g. planes, cylinders etc.). With this guidance we not only continue the surrounding structure into the holes but also synthesize plausible edges and corners from the primitives’ intersections. To this end we give a surface energy functional that incorporates the primitive shapes in a guiding vector field. The discretized functional can be minimized with an efficient graphcut algorithm. A novel greedy optimization strategy is proposed to minimize the functional under the constraint that surface parts corresponding to a given primitive must be connected. From the primitive shapes our method can also reconstruct an idealized model that is suitable for use in a CAD system.
Improved DV-Hop localization algorithm for wireless sensor networks
(2012)

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are usually composed of a great number of randomly deployed nodes that communicate among themselves and gather information about the environment. In many applications, it is required to know geographical location of the sensor which detected an event. The existing localization algorithms can be classified into two categories: range-based and range-free. Range-based algorithms measure the actual distances between nodes, while range-free algorithms approximate the distance based on connectivity information. Range-free localization is cost-effective alternative to a more expensive range based approaches since there is no necessity for additional hardware. However, these techniques usually have higher localization error compared to the range-based algorithms. DV-Hop is one of the range-free localization algorithms utilizing hop-distance estimation. In this paper, we propose an improvement of the range-free DV-Hop localization algorithm and present simulations results to evaluate it.
Syntactic methods for topic-independent authorship attribution
(2017)

The efficacy of syntactic features for topic-independent authorship attribution is evaluated, taking a feature set of frequencies of words and punctuation marks as baseline. The features are ‘deep’ in the sense that they are derived by parsing the subject texts, in contrast to ‘shallow’ syntactic features for which a part-of-speech analysis is enough. The experiments are conducted on a corpus of novels written around the year 1900 by 20 different authors, and cover two tasks. In the first task, text samples are taken from books by one author, and the goal is to pair samples from the same book. In the second task, text samples are taken from several authors, but only one sample from each book, and the goal is to pair samples from the same author. In the first task, the baseline feature set outperformed the syntax-based feature set, but for the second task, the outcome was the opposite. This suggests that, compared to lexical features such as vocabulary and punctuation, syntactic features are more robust to changes in topic.
Object permanence in five-month-old infants
(1985)

A new method was devised to test object permanence in young infants. Fivemonth-old infants were habituated to a screen that moved back and forth through a 180-degree arc, in the manner of a drawbridge. After infants reached habituation, a box was centered behind the screen. Infants were shown two test events: a possible event and an impossible event. In the possible event, the screen stopped when it reached the occluded box; in the impossible event, the screen moved through the space occupied by the box. The results indicated that infants looked reliably longer at the impossible than at the possible event. This finding suggested that infants (1) understood that the box continued to exist, in its same location, after it was occluded by the screen, and (2) expected the screen to stop against the occluded box and were surprised, or puzzled, when it failed to do so. A control experiment in which the box was placed next to the screen provided support for this interpretation of the results. Together, the results of these experiments indicate that, contrary to Piaget’s (1954) claims, infants as young as 5 months of age understand that objects continue to exist when occluded. The results also indicate that 5-month-old infants realize that solid objects do not move through the space occupied by other solid objects. *This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Health (HD-13248) to ESS. The data analysis was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES84-08626) to SW. While working on this research, RI3 was supported by fellowships from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Qu6bec Department of Education. We thank Judy Deloache and Bob Reeve, for their careful reading of the manuscript; Marty Banks, Susan Carey, and Paul Harris, for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript; Wendy Smith Born, Sarah Mangelsdorf, and the members of the Infant Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, for their help with the data collection; and Dawn Iacobucci, for her help with the data analysis. **Reprint requests should be sent to RenCe Baillargeon, Psychology Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 East Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820, U.S.A. OOlO-0277/85/$5.90 0 Elsevier Sequoia/Printed in The Netherlands
Risks and risk mitigation in global software development: A tertiary study
(2014)

Context There is extensive interest in global software development (GSD) which has led to a large number of papers reporting on GSD. A number of systematic literature reviews (SLRs) have attempted to aggregate information from individual studies. Objective: We wish to investigate GSD SLR research with a focus on discovering what research has been conducted in the area and to determine if the SLRs furnish appropriate risk and risk mitigation advice to provide guidance to organizations involved with GSD. Method: We performed a broad automated search to identify GSD SLRs. Data extracted from each study included: (1) authors, their affiliation and publishing venue, (2) SLR quality, (3) research focus, (4) GSD risks, (5) risk mitigation strategies and, (6) for each SLR the number of primary studies reporting each risk and risk mitigation strategy. Results: We found a total of 37 papers reporting 24 unique GSD SLR studies. Major GSD topics covered include: (1) organizational environment, (2) project execution, (3) project planning and control and (4) project scope and requirements. We extracted 85 risks and 77 risk mitigation advice items and categorized them under four major headings: outsourcing rationale, software development, human resources, and project management. The largest group of risks was related to project management. GSD outsourcing rationale risks ranked highest in terms of primary study support but in many cases these risks were only identified by a single SLR. Conclusions: The focus of the GSD SLRs we identified is mapping the research rather than providing evidence-based guidance to industry. Empirical support for the majority of risks identified is moderate to low, both in terms of the number of SLRs identifying the risk, and in the number of primary studies providing empirical support. Risk mitigation advice is also limited, and empirical support for these items is low. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Exploring trajectory-driven local geographic topics in foursquare
(2012)

The location based social networking services (LBSNSs) are becoming very popular today. In LBSNSs, such as Foursquare, users can explore their places of interests around their current locations, check in at these places to share their locations with their friends, etc. These check-ins contain rich information and imply human mobility patterns; thus, they can greatly facilitate mining and analysis of local geographic topics driven by users' trajectories. The local geographic topics indicate the potential and intrinsic relations among the locations in accordance with users' trajectories. These relations are useful for users in both location and friend recommendations. In this paper, we focus on exploring the local geographic topics through check-ins in Pittsburgh area in Foursquare. We use the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to discover the local geographic topics from the checkins. We also compare the local geographic topics on weekdays with those at weekends. Our results show that LDA works well in finding the related places of interests.
Computational Thinking as a Computer Science Education Framework and the Related Effects on Gender Equity
(2016)

I have recently completed my third year of study in the Educational Psychology and Educational Technology doctoral program at Michigan State University. I have successfully completed all of my coursework and comprehensive/qualifying exams. I will be proposing my dissertation study in the Fall semester of 2016 and expect to defend my dissertation in the Fall semester of 2017. My prior research has been focused on issues related to computational thinking, creativity, and computer science education. I am currently developing my literature review and honing my core research questions. I hope to subsequently develop my research methods and measures more fully, with plans to begin fieldwork in Fall of 2016.
A genomic perspective on protein families.
(1997)

In order to extract the maximum amount of information from the rapidly accumulating genome sequences, all conserved genes need to be classified according to their homologous relationships. Comparison of proteins encoded in seven complete genomes from five major phylogenetic lineages and elucidation of consistent patterns of sequence similarities allowed the delineation of 720 clusters of orthologous groups (COGs). Each COG consists of individual orthologous proteins or orthologous sets of paralogs from at least three lineages. Orthologs typically have the same function, allowing transfer of functional information from one member to an entire COG. This relation automatically yields a number of functional predictions for poorly characterized genomes. The COGs comprise a framework for functional and evolutionary genome analysis.
Language Learning in Virtual Reality Environments: Past, Present, and Future
(2015)

This study investigated the research trends in language learning in a virtual reality environment by conducting a content analysis of findings published in the literature from 2004 to 2013 in four top ranked computer-assisted language learning journals: Language Learning & Technology, CALICO Journal, Computer Assisted Language Learning, and ReCALL. Data from 29 articles were cross-analyzed in terms of research topics, technologies used, language learning settings, sample groups, and methodological approaches. It was found that the three most popular research topics for learners were interactive communication; behaviors, affections, and beliefs; and task-based instruction. However, the analysis results highlight the need for the inclusion of the impact of teacher. The data also revealed that more studies are utilizing triangulation of measurement processes to enable in-depth analysis. A trend of gathering data through informal learning procedures was also observed. This article concludes by highlighting particular fields related to VR in which further research is urgently needed.